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The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES THE SLAVE TRADE AND THE ORIGINS OF MISTRUST IN AFRICA Nathan Nunn Leonard Wantchekon Working Paper 14783 http://www.nber.org/papers/w14783 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 March 2009 We thank seminar participants at Boston University, Columbia University, Dalhousie University, Dartmouth College, Georgia Tech, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, LSE, MIT, Simon Fraser University, UCL, University of Michigan, Universitat Pompeu Fabra-CREI, University of Alberta, University of British Columbia, Warwick University, Yale University, ASSA Meetings, EHA meetings, NBER Political Economy Program Meeting, and Sieper's SITE conference, as well as Daron Acemoglu, Michael Bratton, Alejandro Corvalan, William Darity, William Easterly, James Fenske, Patrick Francois, Avner Greif, Joseph Henrich, Karla Hoff, Joseph Inikori, Petra Moser, Elisabeth Ndour, Eva Ng, and Ifedayo Olufemi Kuye, Torsten Persson, Warren Whatley, and Robert Woodberry for valuable comments. We also thank Sayon Deb and Katherine Wilson for excellent research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer- reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. © 2009 by Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon NBER Working Paper No. 14783 March 2009 JEL No. N00,O1 ABSTRACT We investigate the historical origins of mistrust within Africa. Combining contemporary household survey data with historic data on slave shipments, we show that individuals whose ancestors were heavily raided during the slave trade today exhibit less trust in neighbors, relatives, and their local government. We confirm that the relationship is causal by using the historic distance from the coast of a respondent's ancestors as an instrument for the intensity of the slave trade, while controlling for the individual's current distance from the coast. We undertake a number of falsification tests, all of which suggest that the necessary exclusion restriction is satisfied. Exploiting variation among individuals who live in locations different from their ancestors, we show that most of the impact of the slave trade works through factors that are internal to the individual, such as cultural norms, beliefs, and values. Nathan Nunn Department of Economics Harvard University 1805 Cambridge Street Cambridge, MA 02138 and NBER [email protected] Leonard Wantchekon New York University [email protected] 1. Introduction In a recent study, Nunn (2008) examines the long-term impacts of Africa’s slave trade. He finds that the slave trade, which occurred over a period of more than 400 years, had a significant negative effect on long-term economic development. Although the paper arguably identifies a negative causal relationship between the slave trade and income today, the analysis is unable to pin down the exact causal mechanisms underlying the reduced form relationship documented in the paper. In this paper, we examine one of the channels through which the slave trade may affect economic development today. Using fine-grained individual-level survey data, we test whether the slave trade caused a culture of mistrust to develop within Africa. Early in the slave trade, slaves were primarily captured through state organized raids and warfare. By the end of the trade, because of the environment of ubiquitous insecurity that had developed, individuals - even friends and family members - began to turn on one another, kidnapping, tricking, and selling each other into slavery (e.g., Koelle, 1854, Hair, 1965, Piot, 1996). We hypothesize that in this environment, where everyone had to constantly be on guard against being sold or tricked into slavery by those around them, a culture of mistrust may have evolved, and that this mistrust may continue to persist today. Our hypothesis builds on the well-established result from cultural anthropology that in envi- ronments where information acquisition is either costly or imperfect, the use of heuristic decision making strategies or ‘rules-of-thumb’ can be an optimal strategy (Boyd and Richerson, 1985, 1995). These general rules or beliefs about what the ‘right’ action is in different situations saves the individual from the costs of information acquisition. Of course, these norms or rules-of-thumb do not develop in a vacuum, but evolve according to which norms yield the highest payoff. Our view is that in areas more exposed to the slave trade, rules-of-thumb or beliefs based on the mistrust of others would have been more beneficial relative to norms of trust and therefore would have become more prevalent over time. In other words, our hypothesis is that the slave trade would have engendered a culture of mistrust. Because these beliefs and norms persist, particularly in environments where they remain optimal, the relationship between these norms and a history of the slave trade may still exist in the data today – almost 100 years after the slave trade has ended. Alternatively, the culture of mistrust that was a consequence of the slave trade may be an outcome that is stable. In other words, the slave trade may have caused a permanent change in the level 1 of mistrust in the society. Recent contributions, like Tabellini (2008) and Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales (2007c), provide models that show how this can occur. To test our hypothesis, we use data from the 2005 round of the Afrobarometer survey and examine whether individuals belonging to an ethnic group that was heavily targeted in the past are less trusting of others today. Because of the richness of the Afrobarometer survey, we are able to test for the effect of the slave trade on the amount of trust that each respondent places in different individuals. Specifically, we examine the effects of the slave trade on individuals’ trust in (i) their relatives, (ii) their neighbors, and (iii) their local government council. We find that individuals, belonging to ethnicities that were exposed to the slave trades, today exhibit lower levels of trust in their relatives, neighbors, and their local government. This finding is consistent with the historical fact that by the end of the slave trade, it had become very common for individuals to be sold into slavery by neighbors, friends, and family members. An alternative explanation for our finding is that more slaves were supplied by ethnic groups that initially had lower levels of trust of those around them, and that these lower levels of trust continue to persist today. We pursue a number of strategies to identify the direction of causality in our OLS estimates. One strategy we pursue is to use the historic distance from the coast of an ethnic group as an instrument for the number of slaves taken from that ethnic group. There is ample historical evidence suggesting that the instrument is relevant, but it is far less clear that it satisfies the necessary exclusion restriction. The most likely reason why the exclusion restriction may fail is that the historic distance from the coast of an individual’s ancestors is correlated with the current distance from the coast of the respondent, and this in turn is negatively correlated with income (Rappaport and Sachs, 2003), which is positively correlated with trust (Alesina and La Ferrara, 2002).1 For this reason, in our IV estimates, where we use the historic distance from the coast of a respondent’s ancestors as an instrument, we also control for the respondent’s current distance from the coast. The IV estimation produces estimates very similar to the OLS estimates. They provide evidence that the slave trade caused the descendants of those targeted by the trade to be less trusting today. As is generally the case with instruments, it is possible that despite our second stage controls, our instrument still does not satisfy the necessary exclusion restriction. For this reason, we also perform a number of falsification exercises to assess the validity of our identification strategy. We 1Note that this actually results in IV estimates that are biased towards zero. 2 examine the reduced form relationship between distance from the coast and trust within Africa and in two samples outside of Africa using data from the World Values Surveys and the Asiabarometer. Within Africa, we find a strong positive relationship between distance from the coast and trust. This is expected given our IV estimates. Places further from the coast had less slaves taken in the past, and therefore exhibit higher levels of trust today. Our IV strategy relies on the assumption that the distance from the coast only affects trust through the slave trade. Therefore, if our exclusion restriction is satisfied, then when we examine the reduced form relationship between distance from the coast and trust outside of Africa where there was no slave trade, we expect to see no relationship. This is exactly what we find. In our samples outside of Africa, we estimate a statistically insignificant relationship between distance from the coast and trust. We also perform a similar exercise looking within Africa. We find that within the regions of Africa that were not exposed to the slave trade, no relationship exists between an individual’s distance from the coast and trust today. We also find that the relationship increases the more exposed a region was to the slave trade. After establishing that the slave trade had an adverse effect on trust, we then turn to the task of distinguishing between the two most likely channels through which this could have occurred.
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